Interim Country Managing Director — Value Agenda (Consumer and Retail)

A managing director comfortable with subtraction

Most general managers build their reputations by adding: a new format, a new channel, a new category. The person for this seat needs to be just as comfortable taking things away. You will have run a business that crossed six countries, with 900 people and revenue of at least $335 million, and your experience of scale-up, integration and professionalisation will be explored in detail. Scale-up shows you know what it takes to win where you choose to compete; integration shows you can combine and simplify; professionalisation shows you can make choices stick through systems rather than personal force.

Choosing where to play is the core of the job, so strategy formation is needed at level 4. Level 3 will do for operating cadence, for risk judgement and for owning a P&L. When a country asked to keep an exception, you established who was actually paying for it before saying yes. You are at ease with the idea that your first visible win might be something switched off, and you can defend that with evidence. You can tell a board chair what is still unsettled without using it to postpone the decision.

What will be decided, and by whom

The Interim Country Managing Director holds executive authority under the Board Chair. The work centres on one question with many parts: where will this business compete, and where will it deliberately step back? Answering it means setting how country decisions are made, with explicit thresholds for local leadership, and choosing the evidence that will govern spending, capacity and control. It means ruling on every inherited commitment. It means stopping proposals that load cost or risk onto a team without its consent, and declining investment that has not worked out who will use it, what it hinges on and how much could be lost. It also means approving the leadership structure and settling disagreements that set the Board Chair against operating leaders while money and headcount are still uncommitted, because stepping back from an area always lands on somebody's team.

Choosing, moving, embedding

Across the first ninety days, the Board Chair and the managing director should agree where the business will compete and where it will step back, and put a responsible leader against each choice. Around month nine the choices should be visible in how resources move: people and money withdrawn from the areas the business is leaving and redirected to the ones it has chosen, with every inherited commitment ruled on. By month 12 those choices should be built into the country plan and the board's reporting, and the leadership structure should be settled.

Twice with the chair, then wider

The Board Chair takes both of the first two stages: a confidential call over video in week one about where you would look first, then, in week three, a working session in which you work through a choice of where to compete. In week five an executive panel with a leader from each function questions you in person on what your choices would mean for their teams. Week seven is with the full board, and it is the last stage. We respond in writing within two working days of each stage.